Snips and Jibes

On Friday The Nassau Literary Review, the literary magazine of Princeton University (and the second oldest undergraduate literary magazine in the country--it once published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Woodrow Wilson), hosted an on-campus Raconteur Reader event.

The inaugural book of Raconteur Publications, The Raconteur Reader is a compendium of short prose edited by yours truly and featuring work by Oscar nominated screenwriter Robert Festinger (In the Bedroom); O. Henry Prize winner Douglas Light (East Fifth Bliss); Nebula Award Winner Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), Pushcart Prize winner Jess Row (The Train to Lo Wu), recently selected as one of Granta's 2007 Best Young American Novelists; and other acclaimed and emerging writers.

The evening included readings by RR contributors Robert Kaplow, Clay McLeod Chapman, and me. With live music by Jeremy Benson (whose CD comes with the book). This event was part of The Rac-On-Tour (get it?), a literary road show that attempts to bottle The Raconteur "experience" and uncork it at other locales.

We all drove down separately, with the exception of Clay, who met me at the bookshop and rode down with my girlfriend Kristy, factotum/friend Dan, and myself. On the ride we listened to Carla Bruni, a Parisian folksinger/former model who just married the president of France, and learned that Clay’s agent had once been Heide Lange, who represents Dan Brown and had brokered the very profitable Da Vinci deal.

We met the others, Jeremy, Robert, and Robert’s oldest friend Mark (they were in a punk band called the Punsters when Robert was in college, now they’re both in their fifties) at The Alchemist and The Barrister, a pub style restaurant on Witherspoon. I ordered some scotch broth, a pint of Smittick’s and a tumbler of Maker’s. We chatted about Robert’s recent trip to the Isle of Man, where filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused) is shooting the screen version of Robert’s book Me and Orson Welles. It stars Clare Danes, Zac Efron and Christian McKay as Orson Welles. The cast of Linklater's "Dazed and Confused."

The story of how McKay came to play Welles is a fairly interesting one. Mark is a notorious curmudgeon who’s worked the door at the Court Tavern, a New Brunswick music dive, for twenty years. He is, at it turns out, a very sweet person if he counts you among his friends (which, I’m proud to say, I now number) and is Robert’s biggest fan. He has a photo folio of himself handing out paperback copies of Robert’s book to theater stars like Brian Cox, David Morse, and Martha Plimpton. He shows the album to anyone and everyone and his respect for you is calibrated by how many of the (often obscure) actors you can name. When I recognized Rufus Sewell, Mark clearly thought better of me for it. In any case, Linklater had optioned Robert’s book, but any pragmatic action regarding the film would be postponed until they overcame what Linklater saw as a major hurdle: finding a suitable Welles. They actually offered the part to Leonardo Dicaprio. Dicaprio gave a fine performance as Howard Hughes in Scorcese’s bio-pic The Aviator, but he strikes me as very unlike Welles, and he smartly refused. Christian McKay as Orson Welles in the Off Broadway production of "Rosebud."

Mark, who, like Robert, is a Welles buff, found himself, one evening this past summer, at a half-filled third floor theater in midtown watching a one-man show called "Rosebud." The star, despite being a Briton, was a ringer. Mark recommended the production to Robert, who saw it and agreed that the actor was, indeed, spit and image. Robert then recommended the show to Richard, who flew in from Texas. Richard then flew Christian out for screen tests, first to Austin then to California. And finally, this struggling un-agented actor, who had flown from England to do this little show, which, incidentally, he and his wife produced themselves, in this little Times Square theater, was cast in a big movie. All because of the scowly door guy at the Court (who has since been promised a “consultant” credit and an invite to the premiere).

Anyway. Eva, who had organized the event, was, along with her older brother Leon, a former volunteer at The Raconteur. They both left this Fall, she to begin her freshman year at Princeton, he to teach Latin at a private school. Eva was supposed to meet us at the A&B, but got tied up making homemade cookies for the event and, instead, tried to give us directions to Frist over the phone.

Quick story. During my years at Rutgers, I dated a girl who went to Princeton. I wasn’t that serious about her. I liked her. She was smart and pretty. But a little snooty for my taste. One time I suggested we meet at The Barrister. “The Barrister?” she said with a haughty huff. “What’s The Barrister? It’s permissible to call it A& B, or by its full name.” I could hear her supercilious sniffing on the other end. “But if not that, well, then maybe you shouldn’t speak of it at all.” I broke up with her that night.

So our group, which now consisted of Kristy, Dan, Clay, Jeremy, Robert, and Mark (who would stay for the first hour, but would then catch a bus back to NB for his shift at the Court) wandered about campus searching for Frist. The directions had been a bit oblique. Cut across campus on an angle, past the prone lions, through a patch of woods, around the phlox garden (not in bloom), etc. Eva, in equestrian boots and a vented dogtooth coat, was waiting for us outside. She shepherded us in and announced augustly that we would be performing in Einstein’s old lecture hall.The classroom was much as you would think. Cavernous and sloped, with dark wood chairs that had hinged desk trays. There were only about forty people when we arrived, so we decided to wait another fifteen minutes to see if more would show.

Another twenty students straggled in, expressionless and half-hearted, and we quickly understood that they were here to read themselves (the literary magazine would follow our performances with readings from their latest issue) or to see friends read. As Robert began his story, a droll bit about a high school crush, it was painfully evident that they couldn’t care a jot about us.

Even Clay, who gave a captivating performance as a war nurse who agrees to marry declining patients right before they die, drew little response. Clay, who spent the past decade in New York theaters reinventing the art of the campfire tale with his critically acclaimed Pumpkin Pie Show, a rigorous session of theatrical tale telling, is also an accomplished actor and many of his stories were, at one time, memorized monologues, consequently, he often, to excellent effect, performs his pieces rather than simply reading them.

Clay and I were residents in the same East Village theater in the late nineties. Then he got a full page interview in Time Out New York, a two book contract with Hyperion, and great gobs of money. So, for a short time, I hated him. But when I decided to open a book store in central Jersey, he was one of the first people I asked to read here, and he’s been a gracious and generous supporter ever since.

Clay’s been called “hauntingly poetic,” by Time Out New York and compared to William Faulkner by The Village Voice. The Scotsman, Scotland’s leading newspaper, called him “Stephen King transformed into a punk, preacher poet.”

But the crowd was dead. No reaction. So, I decided to read from a story I’d originally deemed too crude for Princeton. It was, in brief, about a dwarf who coaxes a swarm of trained yellow jackets to congregate in perfect wedge formation over her shaven genitalia. Nothing. Maybe a twitter or two. But I could have just as easily been discussing Procopius or chalking out the analogous formula for polynomials or tying my goddamn shoes.

Rounding out The Raconteur part of the evening was Jeremy Benson. Though only thirty, he sings with the flinty voice and hard bitten wisdom of an old man, an aging cowboy, a dock rat, a bindle stiff. He sounds as if he’s lived under a bridge in a cardboard fridge box for thirty years, instead of middle class split levels in Metuchen and Princeton. Jeremy sang a song about how the snake lost its legs, which reminded me of something by junior high bus driver used to say.

I grew up on a horse ranch in Alabama. I went to a private school called Macon Academy, which was about a half hour from our farm. I. J. Coleman used to be a refrigerator salesman until he got the bright idea to fill up delivered freezers with raw meat, venison and such, as a surprise for the customer. He had been fired for that and now he was our bus driver.
“Whaddya know boy.” He’d croak every morning as I got on.
“Not much.”
“You know a snake can’t straddle a log, don’t ya boy?”
“I guess.”
“Good. Now go sit down.”

Jeremy closed with a song about a funeral called “They Don’t Make Coffins Out of Wood Anymore.” As he growled about cold nights crawling with crickets and cops, and men lying in their beds like dead balloons, the audience fidgeted impatiently. And then, with no intermission during which we of the Raconteur could discreetly leave, the undergrads got in line to read their work.

First up: a burly bull of a boy reading a transparent account of his first creative writing class. The kind of kid you’d expect to see at Kean, not Princeton. Then a twiggy sophomore in a sleeveless sweater dress. All knobs and angles, reading a poem in anapestic tertrameter that sounded like Seuss, with a skinny college girl character substituting for Foo Foo the Snoo or the Drum-Tummied Snum. Then a young fabulist who read something about water people, which seemed okay at first, but then I got lost in the intricacies of the water world, the complicated set of rules by which the water people lived, and stopped paying attention.

We sold four Readers (we’d brought down a box of twenty-five) and no T-shirts. Clay took the jitney back to Manhattan. Robert and Jeremy had long since left. Leon was having an informal after-party at his apartment in Hopewell, and a handful of us, maybe ten, caravanned back to his place. It had started to snow. The campus looked beautiful. Black trees, white drifts. A classic movie, crisp and restored. But the drive to Leon’s apartment was treacherous.

Leon’s an interesting guy and a good friend. I recently wrote a story, "The Young Hart Crane in Sailor Garb." Simon, the protagonist, is loosely inspired by Leon. Here’s the description as it is in the story:

Simon was an anachronism. He tried to dress like a Fitzgerald character. But he mostly failed. On a good day he could resemble Gatsby’s Minnesota narrator Nick Carroway, had Carroway swam the Sound separating the two Eggs, rather than boating it. Indeed, even on the driest autumn afternoon, the briskest winter night, his hat brims and shirt collars, his cravats and pocket squares were limp, infused with a mysterious humidity, and now he fingered his flaccid paisley ascot and looked at the man sitting next to him.

Leon’s apartment is fitted out with surprisingly attractive furniture he’d found on the curb (a sideboard, a highboy, a davenport) and ornately framed paintings he’d picked out of the trash. Leon’s somewhat of an artist himself and, accordingly, his place is also decorated with his own sculptures: dioramas housing tiny snake skulls glued to chess pieces, butterfly wings stuck to playing cards, shotgun shells, broken tea cups, wine corks and bottle caps. Under a glass cake dome sits a piece of driftwood hung with globs of dried tar that look like perching bats.

One problem, however, with Leon’s parties is that there’s typically very little to drink (despite his being an excellent beer brewer, a wine maker, and bit of a rumpot) and even less to eat. This time there was homemade hard cider, which was quite good, a little dish of pistachios and a small brick of cheese the size of a cell phone, about enough for ten mousetraps or five stone ground crackers. But the company was good. And so was the music. Alexandre Vertinsky’s “Yellow Angel.” Followed by The Comedian Harmonists. An internationally famous, all-male German close harmony ensemble that operated between 1927 and 1934. They were one of the most successful 20th century musical groups in Europe before World War II and were noted for using their voices to imitate musical instruments. Leon discovered the Harmonists while working at The Raconteur (we play a range of eclectic world music as well as Tom Waits, Nick Cave, The Adverts, Gogol Bordello, etc.). Now he owned several more of the discs, including the rare Liebling, Mein Herz Laesst Dich Gruessen, and followed the recorded music with a live cider-fueled rendition of Veronkia, which actually wasn't bad.The Comedian Harmonists